20th June 2012 will mark a significant date in Park Circus’ historical calendar as the company introduced a new website for clients and classic cinema lovers alike.

Although the new website does not present any radical changes, we feel there have been some key tweaks that have refined the way cinemas can book films from us while allowing classic cinephiles to enjoy a base of rich content which delves into the 15,000-strong back catalogue of films we represent.

We would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank all of our loyal blog followers and we hope that you have enjoyed all we have posted on this site. From interviews with Brandon Schaefer, the man behind some of our best movie posters, to fun top 5 fact postings on films such as Taxi Driver and Pulp Fiction and much much more, it has been a great tool for us to showcase our unrelenting passion for classic films and our eternal aim of allowing these films to be easily put back in cinemas where they belong.

Our blog site will no longer be updated but fear not as our new website has an even better way for film fans to learn about what we do at Park Circus, what films we are focusing on throughout the year and what classics are screening at key festivals and cinema retrospectives alike. Everything you need can now be discovered here.

We welcome your feedback on our new site and you can do so through our social media outlets, on Facebook or Twitter. The new site allows easy access to our YouTube channel with the latest clips and trailers from our upcoming and past releases as well as our Flickr account which presents to you all of our posters – from The Last Picture Show to the soon-to-be released 50th anniversary artwork for Lawrence of Arabia.

Thank you once again to all of our followers and here’s to an exciting rest of 2012 – there’s lots to look forward to….

Where do you start with Stanley Kubrick’s remarkable 1980 psycho-horror The Shining? A film so awash with primitive, elemental spirit that its sweaty paw print is still marking the linen of the horror genre thirty odd years on. The wonder of The Shining’s ageless malice is due to a combination of weird talents who could have only found each other on a cinema set.

There’s Kubrick with his obsessions and stern sense of mise en scene. There’s Jack Nicholson’s demented, willfully hammy turn as a walking conduit for spirits of evil. There’s Garrett Brown’s miraculous work with his own invention the Steadicam, there’s transsexual composer Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s mental electronica additions to the score, cinematographer John Alcott’s old master approach to the interiors…. the list goes on.

Kubrick, ever the wannabe distributor of his own films had even worked out a killer release strategy which allowed the film to only open in a few cinemas and take a month to build by word of mouth before conquering the rest of the world.

All these things and more make The Shining a quite exceptional variation on the old haunted house B-Movie. From the schoolyard to the water cooler the post film debate about The Shining was always a fever of half remembered scenes and declarative lines (“Here’s Johnny!”), but the scene that really encapsulates Kubrick’s vertiginous, callous portrait of a family in isolation and free fall is the one where Jack finally snaps and lets loose on his baseball bat bearing wife (Shelley Duvall), as she creeps away from him backwards up the hotel’s main stairs. So odd and mannered is Nicholson’s performance, so in control and yet demonic, caught mostly from his terrified wife’s point of view as he backs her up the stairs. The hotel lobby behind him composed and oddly styled. In this scene Kubrick accesses the genuine horror of the wife beater, the drunk and the rapist. It’s a scene that culminates with a man being beaten and falling backwards and yet you are in no doubt that he will rise again. This is the queasiest and choicest of all moments in modern horror, one that lingers in the cold light of day, much like a nightmare.

The Shining will be playing at the New Zealand International Film Festival in July and at Nordisk cinemas across Denmark in November.

Filmmaker, producer, screenwriter and arguably America’s most grounded multi-disciplinary filmmaker Jonathan Demme has been quiet of late. The last non-documentary feature he made was the critically divisive Rachel Getting Married in 2008 starring Anne Hathaway. Rachel was generally well received but one critic did compare it to “a two-hour colonoscopy”. For the last few years he’s been absorbed in producing a trilogy of Neil Young concert films, doing some television (including two episodes of the Laura Dern/Mike White drama Enlightened) and developing a film version of Stephen King’s doorstop of a novel 11/22/63. The King adaptation still seems to be simmering away as do future projects with his old actor/playwright friend Wallace Shawn (My Dinner With Andre) and author Dave Eggars (an adaptation of Eggars’ book Zeitoun).

Denzel Washington in Philadelphia

It’s at times like these that it’s good to re-familiarise oneself with Demme’s prolific and seemingly seamless oeuvre. Demme is a filmmaker all too ready to own up to plagiarism. His gift for emulation is always born of love. Hitchcock’s hot breath is all over 1979 thriller Last Embrace starring the mighty Roy Scheider in one of his finest performances. His much-loved new wave rom-com thriller Something Wild owes as much to the films of Preston Sturges as it does to the ‘lovers on the lam’ B movies it brings more directly to mind.

Philadelphia and Silence of the Lambs showed his ability to move between disparate genres with the intelligence and individuality of Nicholas Ray or Elia Kazan. While documentaries Swimming to Cambodia (featuring the late great Spalding Gray) and Storefront Hitchcock were unique and fairly theatrical experiments in form. If anyone is overdue a retrospective of his work, it is Demme.

Do something really wild and book one or many of his films today. JD we salute you!

Ostensibly about Polish Jewish blacksmith turned variety act strongman Siegmund Breitbart (Jouko Ahola) whose swift rise and fall predated the dangerous march of Hitler and the National Socialists by only a matter of weeks, Invincible is a film about the mania of hatred, dissatisfaction and blame that heralds any genocide. Invincible was released in cinemas in 2001 and garnered good reviews but slipped from screens all too quickly and remains little seen, and yet what Invincible can tell us about the direction of both Germany in the early 1930s and Herzog’s career in general is fascinating.

DVD Cover of Invincible

As with Fitzcarraldo before it, Herzog was determined to bring the opera to bear on this tale of mysticism and eccentricity. By its very nature Breitbart’s sorry tale lends itself to Wagnerian analogy and yet at its heart there is something more intricate and intriguing about this disarming film. With it’s pared down sensibility, raw acting and skewed morality the film Invincible can most easily be compared to is Louis Malle’s queasy tale of collaboration and oppression in wartime France – Lacombe Lucien. Yet Malle’s film, as good as it is, is about the seduction of power, Invincible is about the survival of power’s universal essence.

Real life celebrity Erik Jan Hanussen – the Austrian-Jewish clairvoyant, publicist, hypnotist, mentalist, occultist and owner of the occult cabaret where Breitbart finds employment and fame, represents that essence. As played by Tim Roth, Hanussen is equal parts Caligari and Rasputin. Having been immortalized on screen already by Klaus Maria Brandauer in István Szabó’s underrated biopic Hanussen in 1988, Roth keeps the villainy light and the delusion heavy. Hanussen’s role as Hitler’s spiritual advisor and later possible victim is well documented but it is the existence of this eccentric that gives Breitbart’s trajectory its heart and moral equivalence.

The story of Hanussen and Breitbart has long since fascinated those obsessed with the occultist ley lines that cut through time and culture. Indeed in 2001 Mike Mignola’s brilliant Hellboy graphic novel series was finally getting the recognition it deserved thanks to a sustained assault of soft back reprints, and Breitbart and Hanussen’s influence haunt Hellboy like a stinking green undead mist. Squint and it is easy to see Breitbart resurrected as a demonic investigator for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence, Hanussen’s influence is there in both the Nazi occultists Hellboy frequently fights and even in the passing kindness of Hellboy’s surrogate father Professor Bruttenholm.

Aesthetically Invincible’s most noticeable influence however is the pre-World War II Yiddish cinema, the best known of which – Michael Waszynski’s The Dybbuk and Joseph Green’s Yiddle with a Fiddle tread that fine line between melodrama and empathy with a rootsy base charm that asks little of the audience but patience and understanding. Visually simple and sonically charged by composer Hans Zimmer, Invincible is an all too modern paean to these wonderful films. The rise of the Nazis and the subsequent Holocaust put an end to this cinematic tradition much as it did to the careers of Breitbart and Hanussen and all those involved in occult cabaret but Invincible survives.

Like Aguirre, The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Fitzcarraldo and even Rescue Dawn, Invincible is about that place where madness, talent and the human spirit leads us all when everything is going to hell around us.

How odd is Terence Gross’ solo directorial effort Hotel Splendide? It’s about as eccentric as modern British cinema gets. Imagine Michael Powell’s marvelous St Kilda drama The Edge of The World had been bred with Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers and then hand- reared by Bill Forsyth on a diet of Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges. The resulting offspring would possibly resemble this scatological tale of family, isolation, romance, decay and digestion.

As Daniel Craig gears up for his third outing as James Bond in Skyfall, it’s good to remind oneself of where he came from. Hotel Splendide boasts one of his earliest screen performances of note as the frustrated, eternally angry, lovelorn chef of remote resort The Hotel Splendide. The film also features one of the last major performances from the great British actress Katrin Cartlidge, who died two years later, as his phobia-beset sister.

Turning on a theme of the returning avenger, albeit a beautiful elfin one in the shape of Toni Collette as Kath, Hotel Splendide is about the undoing of tradition, the cutting of the ties that bind and the chaos of old sewerage systems. Engagingly played by a young cast that includes Stephen Tompkinson, Toby Jones and Hugh O’Conor alongside Craig and Cartlidge, Hotel Splendide really is an ensemble one-off. Deliberately paced and prone to outbursts of slapstick, action and other general weirdness, it’s hard to think of another British film from the last decade more surprising or deserving of investigation. One of its many charms is Hungarian cinematographer and director Gyula Pados’ richly satisfying use and lighting of the hotel set, a style he would go on to hone in Fateless and The Duchess.

This dark, surreal and comic independent film was made by Film Four under a Tory government soon to be usurped by a New Labour one. The film itself feels like a redress of old school, regressive values in pursuit of something more freeing. Wherever the journey away from that desolate resort took the main characters, it may be worth a visit one last time.

On 27 April this year Charlotte Rampling attended the BFI in London to give a Q&A with journalist Mark Lawson. Angelina Maccarone’s film The Look was the screening, a film on Charlotte Rampling that has the alternative title, A Self Portrait Through Others.

The Look screened as part of Cannes Classics, at the French Film Festival UK and was recently released on DVD by Park Circus. An intriguing and insightful work, The Look is divided into a series of chapters chosen by Rampling and discussed with friends and colleagues across locations such as New York and Paris.

The Look has already been discussed on our blog but here we provide the Q&A session with Charlotte Rampling at the BFI. Let us know your thoughts in our comment section below and enjoy!

On Saturday 19 May, Lawrence of Arabia rode desert sands again for the world premiere of the stunning 4K digital restoration of David Lean’s incredible epic.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the release of Lean’s multi-award winning film which introduced the world to the unique talent of Peter O’Toole and also starred Omar Sharif, Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness, Claude Rains and Jack Hawkins, the version that went before the ever-diligent audiences of Cannes has been lovingly restored to 4K digital by Sony Pictures Entertainment at Sony Pictures Colorworks from the 1988 reconstructed Director’s Cut.

Grover Crisp (pictured, right) from Sony, who oversaw the new digital restoration proudly introduced the screening . In conversation with festival director Thierry Frémaux (pictured, left) he thanked the many talented people involved in keeping Lawrence of Arabia alive for future generations.

The film looked amazing, Freddie Young’s breath-taking cinematography, Maurice Jarre’s all-powerful score and Lean’s exquisite vision dominated the Salle du 60ème and Cannes on the first Saturday of the festival. When the film ended the restoration credits received a round of applause. Lawrence of Arabia has begun its desert trek back into cinemas around the world.

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This is the official blog for Park Circus Limited, the international film sales and distribution company. This site goes behind-the-scenes of our cinema and home entertainment releases. Visit parkcircus.com for our main site.